Minutes and Resolutions October F2F: Printing, Columns, and Pagination

CSS3 Paged Media

Resolved: headers, footers, borders, etc. do print on blank pages. We will add a control for this (e.g. a :blank page selector) later.

Resolved: Adopt proposal that page layout on the current page assumes Initial Containing Block matches current page size and contents lay out accordingly. This requirement is given as a SHOULD, and applies only to non-{Block Formatting Context} elements in the normal flow, all others being undefined.

Discussed page counter scoping. General agreement that page counters and document counters should be able to interact. Need proposal for the exact details.

Resolved:page should be a non-inherited property. auto means look to the nearest non-auto ancestor and use that page value. Implementations that do inherit ‘page’ will be considered conformant to CSS3 Paged Media (since that is the currently-specified behavior), but not CSS4 Paged Media. We will add warning authors that the behavior of ‘page: auto’ would be unpredictable when used within an element with ‘page: somethingelse’.

Pagination

Briefly discussed whether scrollbars are drawn in print media. Per CSS2.1 this is up to the UA.

Resolved: It is not required to make content that’s not visible on the screen visible when printing.

Resolved: Computed height is not consumed by the height between a page break and the bottom of the page. Rationale: A box whose contents fit without overflow on the screen should not trigger overflow in print. We discussed but did not resolve whether backgrounds and borders should print where height is not consumed between the page break and the bottom of the page.

Resolved: Implementations should avoid creating overflow when paginating where there wouldn’t be overflow when unpaginated.

CSS3 Multicol

Discussed overflow of multicolumn elements: whether new columns should be madd off to the side, or whether a new row of columns should be created as overflow below.

To create a layouts where a new set of columns are created below the first, we really would need a column-length property or somesuch and allow the height to be auto, otherwise the new columns will overflow the multicol element and overwrite later content.

Either way, multicolumn layout is not very usable on the screen because it’s designed for paginated media. So we discussed the idea of overflow-style: paginate to create paginated layouts on the screen. (It would fall back to scrolling behavior on down-level clients.)

fantasai noted that the column width algorithm should define available width such that the UA can consider the available width on the page if that is less than the available width of the element.